Neal Stephenson Quotes

The evening went fine. Doob, who had raised three children to adulthood, had figured out a long time ago that any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

The mere suggestion that it might be possible to look at a thing from more than one point of view was infuriating to these people.

[...] people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.

There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.

I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else.

Hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist.

At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul (“Yay, going on a trip!”) even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft.

The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Boredom is a mask frustration wears.